Laura Tack is a young Belgian visual artist. (watch the video)Video Produced by Jennifer Hamblett and Tim Verheyden

Laura grew up in a little village in Flanders, Belgium in a creative environment.Since the age she could handle art material she never stopped creating. In 2006 she decided to study Graphic Design. As she grew up without television it was a big challenge to work in such a digital world. Soon she discovered that you don’t have to design exclusively on the computer, but that you can interweave drawing and computer. In 2010 she obtained a masterdegree in Fine Arts. In that year she avoided design on computer and worked in and with the streets and woods. Her work resulted in an artist’s book* at the end of that academic year.A few weeks after Laura graduated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium – 2010 – she got the opportunity to come to New York.She spends most of her time in her atelier in the lower east side and in the brooklyn art scene. Her life is interwoven with art. It’s not a hobby it’s her life. It’s about thinking and breathing art.

Her earlier work consists of a combination between found materials (such as notes, photographs,…) and pencil, charcoal, paint, spray paint, oilsticks, …People consider them as collages but Laura claims that it’s not about that term: “People sometimes ask me in which medium I work, then I answer most of the times that I make collages, because people expect a convenient answer. But for me I don’t consider my work as collages. My work is ‘work’. I could say that my medium is ‘passion’ instead of collage. The term ‘collage’ reminds me of eldery people puttering on a table in a care center”

Her recent work is less figurative and decorative. It’s very intuitive and therefore actual but there is a theme in her work that is consistent. It’s about space, the relationship between different, individual things and substance.“The fact that finished things come together and become something new is so fascinating for me, almost magical. I consider each finished work as unfinished because there is that constant movement between the work and me, the materials and me. It’s life, like living beings moving physical and mentally from one place to the other all the time. Back and forth. Up and down. That relationship between things has always been in my work even in the struggle between analog and digital. It’s about finding a balance in every connection. Connections between human beings, between art and the artist and between material things.”” Every work has his own existance. When I create it always starts with a very dark motion, almost destructive. It’s an intense experience, a shock. At first it is vague and it has to be like that, otherwise it’s only a visualization of that intense experience. In all the darkness of creating I feel the connection with the material. I am the material. I am the painting. After that moment of creation I feel disappointment and I am unsatisfied. I’m never satisfied with a work because I’m always mentally changing. But as long as I feel there is substance, there is existence I can go on with my unfinished path that is always going to be unfinished”

Laura had a few exhibitions in Belgium. The exhibitions that she had in New York are on a much intenser and different level. That is part of the drive to work harder. To quote Laura: “ At first I thought you could only create if you were inspired. But now I realize that art is part hard work and part inspiration. It would be stupid to sit and wait for that inspiration. Sometimes it’s better to slap yourself and to drag yourself to your workspace. But I never make art against my will.”Laura works and lives in New York and finished in January an exhibition ‘We hungered’ at Con Artist gallery. She works with several artist at the Conartist Space in The Lower East Side in New York.